The proposed research will examine the cognitive bases of children's judgements of morality. Recent research on moral development and perceptions of achievement suggests that intention or motive is a concept which develops in late childhood. Yet the research findings do not square with observations that very young children successfully distinguish between accidental harms and deliberate punishment. The present proposal suggests that young children's use of outcome information is mediated by two cognitive confounds with lead to high salience of outcome information: the fact that outcome information is always presented to the child last (recency effect) and the fact that outcome information is typically given concrete behavioral referrents and is therefore more amenable to iconic representation than is intention information. Research is proposed to demonstrate that the general shift from outcome to intention, which occurs around age 7 or 8, corresponds to the more general shift from iconic to symbolic representation. The research will focus on potential applications to education.